‘September 5’ focuses on news, not Jews, in dramatizing 1972 Munich attack on Israeli Olympians

(JTA) — In September 5, the new movie depicting the abduction and murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics, there are many echoes of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, 51 years, and one month later.

Both are historical tragedies involving the murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists; both involved the taking of hostages, some of whom were American citizens, and both are remembered with the invocation of a specific date.

But September 5 — which opens in limited release this week and is already drawing awards chatter — was not in any way conceived in response to October 7. The movie had been filmed and was already in the post-production process at the time of the 2023 attack.

“I think it will certainly have an effect on how audiences will see the film, but I also think that our film is clearly about a specific moment in history, and or let’s say, even more specifically, a moment in media history, and about that turning point,” Tim Fehlbaum, the film’s director, said in an interview.

“What I would hope is that the audience reflects on how today we consume news, and about our complex media environment, through that historical lens.”

Broadcasting terror

Indeed, September 5 dwells on another way in which the Munich attack paralleled October 7: It represented a watershed moment in the livestreaming of terrorism.

On that day, members of the Palestinian terror group Black September killed two of the Israelis in their dorm in the Olympic Village and held the remaining nine as hostages. After West German authorities botched virtually every stage of the situation, the remaining hostages were all killed at a nearby airport.

The entire tragic saga played out on live television, with ABC Sports, which was covering the Games, staying on air for most of the day. The film focuses not on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor the experiences of the athletes and those seeking to save them, but on the ABC reporting team that went to West Germany to cover the Games and ended up in the middle of a deadly crisis.

The film depicts the split-second decisions that the reporters and producers — including Peter Jennings, who appears in the film and is also portrayed in some scenes by actor Benjamin Walker — must make while covering a hostage crisis as it plays out. At one point, there is a debate over whether the journalists should call the Black September attackers “terrorists.” At another, a young producer asks aloud, “Can we show someone being shot on live television?” And in another scene, German police seek to crack down on coverage that shows the positions of their sharpshooters.

The story is told with uncommon tension, including the use of vintage television equipment, which the filmmakers wanted to make sure was period-accurate, even though tracking down the right supplies was at times challenging.

“When we were making our research, we learned, more and more, the role the media played in that day,” Fehlbaum said. “Then, we were lucky enough to get in conversation with one of the eyewitnesses, and was in the control room that day, Geoffrey Mason. During this conversation, that was the moment when we finally decided that we wanted to tell the story entirely from that angle.”

The Jewish actor John Magaro plays Mason, a young ABC producer at the time who is not himself Jewish, and who is the only one of the principal figures in the film who is still alive. (He is the one who asks about showing a shooting on live TV.) Another key character is Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), a veteran ABC Sports producer who was Jewish and whose pain at covering the crisis is clear throughout.

“We learned that from Geoffrey Mason, from private conversations that he had with him, with Marvin’s background, how it still — you could tell that this was not so long after World War II that they were in Munich for the broadcast of these Olympics,” Fehlbaum said.

Despite his Ashkenazi-sounding surname, Fehlbaum, who is a native of Switzerland, does not have any Jewish ancestry. But the director went to film school in Munich, and in that city, he said, “this tragedy is still very present.”

One through-line in the film is that the Olympics, the first to take place in Germany since the Games Hitler hosted in 1936, were meant to “welcome to the world to a new Germany,” in the words of a German official, at a time when World War II and the Holocaust were still in living memory for most people.

Mark Spitz, a Jewish American swimmer, won seven gold medals, and the producers are depicted discussing whether to ask Spitz about “winning gold in Hitler’s backyard.” Among the massive amount of archival footage in the film is one of Spitz’s wins, as well as a feature about the Israeli Olympians, including American-Israeli wrestler David Berger, visiting Dachau days before they met their deaths.

Peter Sarsgaard plays famed ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge, while ABC anchor Jim McKay, who led the coverage that day, appears only in archival footage.

September 5 is at least the third major motion picture about the hostage crisis. “One Day in September,” Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary from 1999 about the Munich crisis, was a major influence on the film, Fehlbaum said.

As for the other major film about the massacre, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Munich, it’s very different, focusing mainly on the aftermath of the tragedy, on Israel’s campaign of revenge, and how one fictional soldier, Eric Bana’s Avner, became disillusioned with it.

“Steven Spielberg, I mean, that’s of course a big influence on me, regardless of ‘Munich,’ all of his films, generally,” Fehlbaum said. “Munich, of course, also we studied carefully, but … our film has a very different perspective on this tragedy.”